Author, Speaker, and Consultant on Hyperinnovation, Future Studies, GigaMarket$, The New Industrial Revolution, and Advanced Robotics and (iRev) Intelligence Revolution.

Tuesday, 7 August 2012

an admired management consulting business for many many years now recently put out a paper that looks, by the trends, at trillion 8 dollar growth markets.

I found its full of facts you can pick up on the net. But it does have unique insight, plus the data is all in one place. Here’s the intro:

'Daily turmoil on a
global scale is giving business leaders and investors plenty of reasons to stay
hunkered down as they confront huge challenges in the here and now. Spreading
sovereign debt woes, volatile markets, unstable currencies, political gridlock and
stalled growth plague the big developed economies. Meanwhile, China, India and
other rapidly emerging economies are flexing their strength as they adjust to
the phenomenal growth that has been the biggest economic story of the past two
decades.

In the conventional
view, the current turbulence portends deep, enduring structural shifts that
will set the business agenda for the foreseeable future. We fully expect
macroeconomic shocks over the coming decade, with discontinuities that will
shape the options companies have to adapt and grow.

Yet behind the dire
headlines and day-to-day frictions of the marketplace, eight trillion-dollar
macro trends are at work in the global economy. The pursuit by businesses and
governments of the macro trends’ growth potential will touch many corners of
the globe.

Europe, Japan and the
US certainly face an extended period of economic turbulence and slow growth,
particularly in the first half of the decade. But as we will see, half of the
macro trends affect both emerging and advanced economies. Thus, while we
embrace the exciting opportunities in emerging markets, we also see
opportunities where many commentators see none right now—in the home markets of
many of the world’s leading businesses.

A shift in global growth.Although we will continue to see pockets of
economic turbulence, look for the global economy to expand at a 3.6 percent
annual rate over the longer term, resulting in world GDP swelling to $90
trillion by 2020—40 percent larger than it is today. The sources of economic
growth will tilt increasingly toward emerging economies. Whereas the advanced
economies currently generate two-thirds of global GDP, developing and emerging
economies will contribute an outsized share of the growth in the future. By
2020, the advanced economies’ proportion of world GDP will drop to 58 percent,
a sizable change over a relatively short period.

The growth of world population by 750
million, nearly all of it originating in developing and emerging economies,
will account for about one-quarter of the rise in GDP. Increased productivity
will generate the rest, as per capita GDP grows by 30 percent over that period.
But, while we expect the next few years to remain challenging in the West, we
can see a path for growth to accelerate in the latter half of the decade,
particularly if governments begin tackling their public and private debt
burdens. Indeed, our analysis anticipates that Europe and the US will
contribute an additional $8 trillion to global GDP by 2020.'

Monday, 6 August 2012

PopFab — 3D printer fits inside a briefcase (Intro)

Pop-Fab is a 3D printer that fits inside a briefcase. At its heart is a computer-controlled motion platform and a means of attaching various tool heads. These enable PopFab to make objects from a digital plan in a variety of ways: current capabilities include 3D printing, milling, vinyl cutting, and drawing — with more on the way. PopFab has traveled the world as a carry-on item of luggage.

Except form Wired website."Thirty years ago, when John Naisbitt was writing Megatrends, his prescient vision of America’s future, he used a simple yet powerful tool to spot new ideas that were bubbling in the zeitgeist: the newspaper. He didn’t just read it, though. He took out a ruler and measured it. The more column inches a particular topic earned over time, the more likely it represented an emerging trend. “The collective news hole,” Naisbitt wrote, “becomes a mechanical representation of society sorting out its priorities”—and he used that mechanism to predict the information society, globalism, decentralization, and the rise of networks.

As clever as Naisbitt’s method was, it would never work today. There’s an infinite amount of ink and pixels spilled on most any topic. These days, spotting the future requires a different set of tools. That’s why at Wired, where we constantly endeavor to pinpoint the inventions and trends that will define the future, we have developed our own set of rules. They allow us to size up ideas and separate the truly world-changing from the merely interesting. After 20 years of watching how technology creates a bold and better tomorrow, we have seen some common themes emerge, patterns that have fostered the most profound innovations of our age.

This may sound like a paradox. Surely technology always promises something radically new, wholly unexpected, and unlike anything anybody has seen before. But in fact even when a product or service breaks new ground, it’s usually following a familiar trajectory. After all, the factors governing thermodynamics, economics, and human interaction don’t change that much. And they provide an intellectual platform that has allowed technology to succeed on a massive scale, to organize, to accelerate, to connect.

So how do we spot the future—and how might you? The seven rules that follow are not a bad place to start. They are the principles that underlie many of our contemporary innovations. Odds are that any story in our pages, any idea we deem potentially transformative, any trend we think has legs, draws on one or more of these core principles. They have played a major part in creating the world we see today. And they’ll be the forces behind the world we’ll be living in tomorrow."

Ramesh Raskar: Imaging at a trillion frames per second.

This photographic technology can see light actually move.

Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography, a new type of imaging so fast it visualizes the world one trillion frames per second, so detailed it shows light itself in motion. This technology may someday be used to build cameras that can look “around” corners or see inside the body without X-rays.

Photography is about creating images by recording light. Ramesh Raskar and his team members have invented a camera that can photograph light itself as it moves at, well, the speed of light.

Well, I think as scientific discover and technological breakthrough continue to speed up, we are going to find it difficult to differentiated between emperical science and, well, magic. We can actual now see the speed of ligh!!!

Behrokh Khoshnevis — contour crafting: automated construction

Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California, has spent the last 15 years working on a machine that will “print” buildings. He calls the practice Contour Crafting.

The technology, he says, will be faster than all conventional building methods (including prefab construction), cheaper, and use less energy. It can build whatever you can program into a computer, so it will offer unprecedented design flexibility — right angles, wild patterns, or soft curves.

“Contour Crafting will most probably be one of the very few feasible approaches for building structures on other planets, such as the Moon and Mars, which are being targeted for human colonization before the end of the new century,” says Professor Khoshnevis.

'....Out there, it's only you and your music. No time for games. Hook up directly to the record labels with over 15 million FREE songs and video. 100% legal. 100% safe. Live your life through your music with BearShare - the newest, fastest and safest P2P program out there. It's all real, and it's all here."

In an earlier post I discussed the issues of technological innovation and individual athlete performance enhancement.

Here's a link to Nike+Fuelband site. Basically it's a light weight wristband 'Accelerometer' and database that measures your split, whether dancing, running, biking and and other physical activities. You can down load the data to an i-phone App.

Download for Free

Doctorow is mainly known for writing great fiction, but he also co-founded Boing Boing, and this collection of essays on the nature of content is outstanding. He is a great example of how to use “free” as a method for actually turning a profit. He’s tried numerous experiments in this regard, which is the essence of innovation. Question: why is it mainly authors that are doing these experiments, when it is publishers that are under threat? I wish I knew the answer…'Below you'll find links to downloadable editions of the text of Content. These downloads are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which lets you share it, remix it, and share your remixes, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis.